Well, all this is interesting to me, anyway, and that's what matters here. The Internet is a terrible thing for someone like me, who finds almost everything interesting.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Gun accidents just didn't happen in the past

Right-wing Christian pastor, turned pseudo-historian, David Barton is at it again:

After a decade of debunking pseudo-historian David Barton’s claims about American history, it’s pretty hard for anything that comes out of his pie hole to surprise me, but even I was taken aback by the utter preposterousness of one of his latest claims — that gun accidents just didn’t happen in the founding era! ...

BECK: “Kids did not shoot each other.”

BARTON: “Oh no. No, no, no. Again, two accidents I have seen in two hundred years of everybody having guns. It just didn’t happen.”

Barton claimed on his radio show to have “searched” and only found two gun accidents in the founding era, but his claim became even more incredible on [Glenn] Beck’s show. Now it’s two gun accidents in two hundred years!

I really have to wonder just where the eminent historian Barton actually “searched” to only find two gun accidents in two hundred years when I was easily able to find countless reports of gun accidents in just a few minutes with nothing more than a quick search of Newsbank’s historical newspapers archive. All it took was simply searching on a few combinations of words that you’d expect to find together in articles about gun accidents.

I found a plethora of articles about hunting accidents and other accidental shootings among adults, but what I primarily want to focus here on the accidents involving children, since Barton’s claim is that all children were taught to use guns and that is why there were no gun accidents.

This is a just small sampling of the articles I found, many of which, as you’ll see, sound just like the articles you see today — most of them ending with warnings to parents about leaving guns around children or letting children play with guns, and many of them noting that gun accidents were a very frequent occurrence...

Why do people believe anything David Barton says? Partly, I suppose, it's because he sounds so authoritative. And he's an evangelical Christian pastor. He wouldn't just lie, would he?

This isn't just about religion, unless you think Jesus was a big fan of assault rifles. Barton is that combination of religious nut and right-wing political fanatic that's so common in the Republican Party these days.

As she says, Chris Rodda has been debunking Barton's claims for decades. And in this post, she points out some other examples of his dishonesty. For one thing, she shows how he used excerpts of a letter from John Quincy Adams to deliberately give the wrong impression on Glenn Beck's show. And then there are the parts he leaves out:

Not to digress too much, but I can’t help but mention something else here about the way Barton portrays John Quincy Adams and his son George. In addition to the letter about learning to use guns, Barton loves to bring up the letters that Adams wrote to George instructing him on how to read and study the Bible. But what Barton never mentions is how George turned out. What was the result of the strict regimen of Bible study and manly-man activities that Adams imposed upon his son? Well, George took to drinking and gambling, knocked up a servant girl at the home of a family friend, and eventually committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight. Barton never gets to that part of the story.

But my favorite is how David Barton takes a story from a work of fiction and presents it as history:

After reading from the letters of Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, Barton told his tale about a classroom full of gun-toting elementary school children in the 1850s saving their teacher’s life by whipping out their guns to stop a gunman who came to their school — a story that appears to have come not from an actual historical event, but from the Louis L’Amour novel Bendigo Shafter, as I wrote last week in my post “Is David Barton Now Getting His ‘History’ From Louis L’Amour Novels?” (An update on that post: Barton never answered my email requesting a source for his story.)

This is the kind of "historian" David Barton is. But, of course, he's not a historian. He's a right-wing pastor trying to rewrite history to suit his political and religious beliefs.

And he's very popular on the right. After all, those real historians are all just liberal eggheads following Satan's orders to promote the socialist New World Order, right? So who are you going to believe?

If you're watching Glenn Beck in the first place, you're probably going to believe Barton. Well, when you're faith-based, you're going to believe what you want to believe. But this wouldn't be a problem if it were just Glenn Beck's audience. No, it's a lot wider than that. It's become the entire Republican Party these days.

No, not every Republican believes this stuff, I'm sure, but these are the people who control today's Republican Party. Thanks to the GOP's notorious 'Southern strategy,' these people have become the Republican base.

Even the leaders of the Republican Party praise David Barton. He's a real favorite on Fox 'News.' In the right-wing bubble they live in, they create their own reality, and David Barton's rewriting of history is just the kind of fantasy they want to believe.

We've seen how today's Republicans have become anti-science. We've seen how they reject anything they don't want to believe about the real world, despite overwhelming evidence. But this is how they treat history, too. And this is the history they want to teach to children, as well - in some states, like Texas, the history they do teach to children.

The fact that it's not true is immaterial. Their faith will make it true, right? As Winston Churchill said, history is written by the victors. And they're determined to win in America, no matter what it takes.

2 comments:

Today's right wing is the epitome of the Richard Pryor joke about his wife catching him in bed with another woman. First, with a straight face, he denies having sex with the woman in question. Then he has the audacity to say to his wife, "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

On a side note, I've been taking pot-shots at Jody P again. Since the election, Jody's been trying to play the pity-party, 'woe-is-me' angle. And Jody still thinks he/she/it can win an argument by slurring the President's last name (Obummer, Odumma, Obozo, etc).

That's OK. If Jody wants to stick his/her/its face out there, I'll be happy to oblige with a intellectual custard pie. Splat!! :)

That's pretty good, Jeff. But going by the stuff I keep seeing at Snopes.com, it only scratches the surface of right-wing crackpottery. :)

I glad you're still fighting the good fight at the Lincoln Journal Star. But since the paper went behind a paywall, I've been getting my local and state news - and commenting, occasionally - from the websites of local television stations. Well, it's better than nothing.

Bill Garthright

I'm a skeptic. I think it makes sense to have reasons for what I believe, so I apportion my belief to the evidence. You're welcome to disagree. Please, tell me I'm wrong. I probably don't agree with anyone about everything. Why should disagreement be a problem? Check the Pages section below for series posts and links to book reviews and game posts, as well as contact info. I have varied interests, so there's a little bit of everything here. I encourage you to look around. - Bill

Followers

Quotes

We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. - Robert Wilensky

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong - Richard Feynman

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other. - Sir Francis Bacon

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Speculation is perfectly all right, but if you stay there you've only founded a superstition. If you test it, you've started a science. - Hal Clement

No matter how many times a theory meets its tests successfully, there can be no certainty that it will not be overthrown by the next observation. This, then, is a cornerstone of modern natural philosophy. It makes no claim of attaining ultimate truth. In fact, the phrase "ultimate truth" becomes meaningless, because there is no way in which enough observations can be made to make truth certain and, therefore, "ultimate". - Isaac Asimov

The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion. - Treaty of Tripoli, passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams (1797)

I don't doubt the sincerity of dowsers, but even after we've demonstrated that they can't produce results that are any better than chance they'll still go away believing in their abilities... It is like the mother whose son is caught shoplifting on tape. She wonders why someone would want to frame her child by producing a fake video. - James Randi

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church ... imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. - Mark Twain

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths. - Bertrand Russell

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Friedrich Nietzsche

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. - Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.

This is not about proof. Science does not use proof. We favor evidence, and the work consists largely of the slow accumulation of evidence in support of ideas, not magically potent proofs that establish an idea as unassailable. - PZ Myers

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. - President Barack Obama

The formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat. - Shekhar Gupta

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. - Sam Harris

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. - Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553

Democracy is not about majority rule; it is about minority rights. If there is no culture of not simply tolerating minorities, but actually treating them with equal rights, real democracy can't take root. - Thomas L. Friedman

We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason. - Thomas Macauley, 1830

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven into an age of unreason if we dig deep into our history and remember we are not descended from fearful men. - Edward R. Murrow

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. Science is simply common sense at its best - that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic. - Thomas Huxley

There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. ... Erecting the "wall of separation between church and state," therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society. - President Thomas Jefferson

To be elected in America, no matter from what party, the candidates have no choice but to year after year pledge to lower taxes further and further. We have become the nation of Ken and Barbie, looking good but very poor at the math. - Rack Jite

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them. - Steve Eley

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. - President Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle. - Molly Ivins

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. - H. L. Mencken

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. - Winston Churchill